BZRK (BZRK 1)

“Yes, sirs,” he said. Because Bug Man didn’t want to try to guess what happened to people who refused to do “favors” for Twofer.

Bug Man emerged, serious and shaky, from behind the screen. Jessica was waiting.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve got to go. Big problem at work.”

Jessica pouted, and that was about enough to break Bug Man’s will, but no, he wasn’t ready to keep the Twins waiting.

“But I only need you for five minutes.”

The next five minutes, and all the rest of the conversation, was overheard by a single biot.

The biot—a specialized model adapted to picking up the kinds of large sound waves made by a vocal cord longer than their entire body—had spent six weeks inside Jessica’s right ear. Six weeks of earwax and near misses with Q-tips the size of blimps and earbuds blasting music that was sheer vibration.

Six weeks, weakening day by day, holding on despite everything, and now just days from death unless the biot could be taken out in a clean extraction.

In the coffee shop across the street, Wilkes sat typing away on her laptop, pretending to be working on a novel, headphones on her ears.

Wilkes wasn’t the best twitcher—she wasn’t looking for a battle with Bug Man. But little Buggy hadn’t found her, had he? He had come close a few times, close enough that she could read the serial numbers of his nanobots and clearly see his creepy exploding head logo. But she had lain low. She had frozen in place. And the nanobots that might have killed her biot and driven Wilkes to madness had gone scurrying past.

Wilkes was not a great fighter down in the nano. She was much more capable in the macro, because when pushed, Wilkes was a little rage-o-holic. She affected a tough-girl style that wasn’t just style. She didn’t wear those big Doc Martens to look cool, she wore them to make her kicks count when she applied them.

Wilkes had a few interesting tattoos. Her right eye had dark flames painted downward, maybe more like shark’s teeth or the stylized teeth of a ripsaw. On the inside of her left arm she wore a QR-code tattoo. Shoot a picture of it with your phone and you’d be taken to a page that just had a picture of Wilkes’s raised middle finger and a circular logo that showed a Photoshopped pic of Wilkes st

abbing a dragon in the eye.

There was a second QR-code tattoo in a, shall we say, less public location. It led to a different sort of page altogether.

She was a troubled teen, Wilkes was. Troubled, yes. And trouble, too.

But she could be patient when she had to be. Six weeks of this coffee shop, and a crappy little basement hole-in-the-wall apartment next door to Bug Man’s home.

In a weary voice Wilkes said, “Gotcha, Buggy. Got you good.”

(ARTIFACT)

To: Lear

From: Vincent

Summary:

Wilkes’s surveillance of Bug Man’s girlfriend has paid off.

1) Confirmed: Bug Man was the twitcher for the McLure hit.

2) Bug Man is being given a strategic as well as tactical role.

This may indicate a serious problem with Burnofsky.

3) Confirmed: AFGC plans move at UN. POTUS is target #1.

Other heads of state as well.

Recommend:

1) Given our need for biot resources, especially in view of the AFGC initiative and paralysis at McLure corporate, I recommend finalizing the Violet approach.

2) Accelerated training of new recruits.